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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.